movement toward flexiblization in the Chinese automobile industry, however, encountered ...... 14-22. 48. "Laowu paiqiangong weiquan zaoyu falv nanti:'.
Workers in Hard Times A longView of Economic Crises
Edited by Leon Fink, joseph A. McCartin, and joan Sangster
UNIVERSITY OF IlliNOIS PRESS Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
"Transformative Power: Lessons from the Greek Crisis and Beyond" by Hilary Wainwright was previously published in Socialist Register and has been reprinted with permission of the Merlin Press Ltd. ©Merlin Press Ltd. w'~v.merlinpress.co.uk.
2013
© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America C54321 @l This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Workers in hard times : a long view of economic crises I edited by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, and Joan Sangster. pages em.- (The working class in American history) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03817-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-252-09597-9 (ebook) 1. Working class-Case studies. 2.
Business cycles-Case studies.
3· Economic policy-Case studies. I. Fink, Leon, 1948- II. McCartin, Joseph Anthony. IlL Sangster, Joan, 1952HD4854.W597 331.09-dc23
2014 2013034370
Part Ill. Social-Welfare Struggles from the Liberal to the Neoliberal State
6. Workers' Social-Wage Struggles during the Great Depression and the Era ofNeoliberalism: International Comparisons 113 Alvin Finkel
7- Politics and Policies in the 1970s and Early Twenty-first Century: The Linked Recessions 141 Judith Stein
8. Neoliberalism at Work in the Antipodean Welfare State in the Late Twentieth Century: Collusion, Collaboration, and Resistance 161 Melanie Nolan
Part lV. Workers and the Shakeup of the New World Order
9- Want amidst Plenty: The Oil Boom and the Working Class in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1992-2010 187 Sean Cadigan
10. Whose Hard Times? Explaining Autoworkers Strike Waves in Recent-Day China 213 LuZhang
11. Transformative Power: Lessons from the Greek Crisis and Beyond 243 Hilary Wainwright
12. How Workers and the Government Have Dealt with Economic Crisis and Industrial Decline: 1929 and 2007 263 Edward Montgomery
Contributors Index
293
289
1 Whose Hard Times? Explaining Autoworkers Strike Waves in Recent-Day China LU ZHANG
In contrast to the generally passive responses of organized labor in the West to the 2008 global economic crisis, China has witnessed a major wave of labor unrest in the forms of wildcat strikes, legal disputes, protests, and demonstrations.1 A showcase of this autonomous worker insurgency was a wave of auto-manufacturing strikes that rocked China in the summer of 2010. 2 The historic events unfolded when a nineteen-day strike at Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (a transmission plant that provides So percent of automatic transmissions for Honda's assembly plants in China) in Foshan, Guangdong Province, shut down the japanese automaker's four assembly plants and brought Honda production in China to a dead halt. At the peak of the strike, over 1,8oo striking workers, mostly young migrant workers and student intern workers, walked out, demanding not only a significant pay increase but also the ability to elect their own union officials at the factory union branch of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the only legal trade union in China-' The Honda strike received extensive media coverage within and outside China 4 Interestingly, the domestic publicity suggests a level of tacit support by the Chinese central government for the strildng workers' demands for a wage increase. Indeed, against the backdrop of the central government's policy shift from an export-led growth model based on cheap labor to a more balanced one based on domestic consumption (and thereby higher wages), the success of the autoworkers stril
